On 15 July 2025, Omer Bartov—Israeli-born, IDF-trained, and one of the world’s most distinguished Holocaust historians—published a declaration in The New York Times that cannot be dismissed: “Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.”

This is not a fringe opinion or a rhetorical flourish. Bartov joins an expanding consensus of leading genocide scholars—including Raz Segal, William Schabas, Melanie O’Brien, Dirk Moses, and Uğur Ümit Üngör—who have concluded that Israel’s actions meet the legal criteria for genocide as defined by the 1948 Genocide Convention: namely, acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.

The factual evidence supporting this conclusion is overwhelming. The declarations of intent by Israeli officials are unambiguous. The acts of destruction are both systematic and well-documented. Moreover, the complicity of Western governments—especially that of the United Kingdom—represents not merely a failure of oversight, but a pattern of active enablement that will bring enduring shame upon every institution involved.

Since October 2023, successive British governments—first Conservative under Rishi Sunak and now Labour under Keir Starmer—have failed to prevent the genocide. More than that, they have facilitated its continuation through arms exports, intelligence sharing, diplomatic obstruction, and the suppression of domestic dissent. Their predecessors—Theresa May, Boris Johnson, and Liz Truss—constructed the political infrastructure that prioritised Israeli impunity over Palestinian lives. As a result of these cumulative actions, Britain’s leaders and their apologists now bear the Mark of Cain: a public and permanent sign of moral culpability, warning future generations that the British state knowingly abetted one of the gravest crimes of the twenty-first century.

A Genocide That Has Been Documented in Real Time

Since 7 October 2023, Israel’s military campaign in Gaza has resulted in the deaths of over 58,000 Palestinians, according to figures from the Gaza Ministry of Health and corroborated by UN sources. Among the dead are more than 17,000 children and at least 800 infants. Scholars now estimate that the real death toll, when accounting for those trapped beneath rubble or killed by starvation, could exceed 200,000—nearly one in ten of Gaza’s total population.

The destruction of infrastructure is no less extreme. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), approximately 70 percent of Gaza’s 174,000 buildings are either destroyed or uninhabitable. This includes the destruction of 87 percent of all schools, the demolition of every university, and the disabling of 19 out of 36 hospitals. The deliberate targeting of water facilities and the imposition of blockades have triggered a famine. As of June 2025, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) reported that 96 percent of Gaza’s population is suffering from acute food insecurity. At least 27 children have died from dehydration and malnutrition.

This level of devastation cannot be described as collateral damage. It constitutes a methodical campaign to destroy the capacity of Palestinians in Gaza to survive as a national community. Israeli leaders have confirmed this intent through their own words. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoked the biblical story of Amalek—a passage in which God commands the Israelites to kill every man, woman, child, and infant. Deputy Knesset Speaker Nissim Vaturi declared publicly that the Gaza Strip should be “erased from the earth.” Defence Minister Yoav Gallant referred to Palestinians as “human animals” and promised to “eliminate everything.” Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, whom the UK government eventually sanctioned for incitement, suggested that starving two million people might be both “justified and moral.”

These statements have been cited by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) as credible evidence of genocidal intent. The ICJ concluded in January 2024 that there is a “plausible risk of genocide” in Gaza. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide requires not only punishment after the fact but also prevention while the crime is ongoing. The United Kingdom, by choosing to continue its support, has violated that obligation.

Britain’s Complicity: A Deliberate and Documented Betrayal

Britain’s role in this genocide is not passive. It is deliberate, ongoing, and supported by a bipartisan political consensus. Since October 2023, both Conservative and Labour governments have approved arms exports, provided surveillance assistance, blocked international ceasefire resolutions, and curtailed the right to protest at home. These policies have not only failed to stop the killing but have actively facilitated its continuation.

The Conservative Foundations of British Complicity

Between 2015 and 2023, Conservative-led governments issued arms export licences to Israel totalling £487 million. These included key components for F-35 fighter jets and precision-guided munitions used in airstrikes on civilian infrastructure in Gaza. Under Theresa May’s leadership, the 2017 UK-Israel trade agreement significantly expanded military cooperation. Boris Johnson followed with a 2020 agreement on bilateral defence technology, while his government formally opposed the ICC’s investigation into Israeli war crimes.

Liz Truss, during her short tenure in 2022, announced a review of relocating the UK embassy to Jerusalem, signalling her government’s willingness to legitimise Israel’s illegal settlement activities.

Under Rishi Sunak’s leadership, UK complicity intensified. His government approved £18 million in arms exports to Israel in 2023 alone, even after the October 7 attacks. It also conducted 518 Royal Air Force surveillance flights over Gaza between December 2023 and April 2024, as confirmed by Declassified UK. These flights provided real-time targeting data to the IDF, making the UK a direct participant in the military campaign.

Sunak’s administration abstained from three UN Security Council ceasefire resolutions in late 2023. Foreign Secretary David Cameron refused to suspend arms sales, asserting that they complied with “international law,” despite warnings from more than 600 British lawyers—including former Supreme Court justices—that such exports made the UK complicit in genocide.

Labour’s Continuity of Complicity

Despite campaign rhetoric promising a break with Conservative policy, Keir Starmer’s Labour government has maintained many of the same practices. In October 2023, while still opposition leader, Starmer publicly endorsed Israel’s “right” to cut off Gaza’s water and electricity. This statement, condemned by multiple international legal scholars, aligned Labour policy with war crimes before it even entered government.

Since taking office in July 2024, Starmer’s administration has suspended just 30 of 350 active arms export licences. Crucially, it has continued to export F-35 components and other dual-use technologies. Between July and December 2024, the Labour government approved £126 million in arms exports to Israel—more than the Conservatives approved between 2020 and 2023.

Foreign Secretary David Lammy has consistently refused to acknowledge the ICJ’s genocide findings, arguing that the matter remains “under judicial review.” Meanwhile, Labour has continued to arrest pro-Palestinian protesters, with over 1,200 arrests since October 2023 under laws tightened by both parties. The party’s 2024 “Extremism Definition” policy has even been used to criminalise public references to genocide, branding such speech as “hateful.”

Labour’s refusal to condemn Israel’s defiance of the ICJ’s July 2024 ruling—declaring its occupation illegal and apartheid in character—has further cemented its position as a government of continuity rather than change.

Catholic Moral Theology and the Principle of Cooperation in Evil

According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC §1868), individuals and states share responsibility for the sins of others “when they cooperate in them.” This includes approving them, failing to prevent them, or protecting their perpetrators. St. Thomas Aquinas teaches in Summa Theologiae (II-II, q. 64) that the direct killing of innocents is always morally forbidden and that the enabling of such acts, when freely chosen and unnecessary, constitutes grave sin.

Britain’s arms exports, intelligence sharing, and political endorsements cannot be dismissed as distant or unintentional. They are direct, proximate, and voluntary. As such, they represent formal cooperation with evil in the most severe sense defined by Catholic moral tradition. The British state is no longer a bystander to genocide. It is a participant in it.

The Mark of Cain

Genesis records that when God confronted Cain over the murder of his brother Abel, Cain replied, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” In response, God placed a mark upon him—not as a punishment of vengeance, but as a permanent sign of guilt visible to the world. Today, that mark rests on Britain’s political class.

• It rests on Theresa May, who expanded arms deals to a regime already engaged in systematic abuses.
• It rests on Boris Johnson, who obstructed legal accountability at the International Criminal Court.
• It rests on Liz Truss, who offered ideological cover to Israeli expansionism.
• It rests on Rishi Sunak, who provided bombs, targeting data, and political protection.
• It rests on Keir Starmer, who has maintained arms flows, criminalised protest, and used legal obfuscation to delay action.
• It rests on David Cameron and David Lammy, who have misrepresented international law.
• It rests on the civil servants who authored these policies, the editors who refused to report them accurately, and the think tanks that sanitised mass murder as “strategic policy.”

This mark cannot be washed away by parliamentary speeches or future apologies. It will remain as a record of what was done, and of those who did it.

A Betrayal of History and a Warning to the Future

Omer Bartov warned that Israel’s genocide not only destroys Palestinian life—it desecrates the moral legacy of the Holocaust. The slogan “Never Again” has been weaponised, used to justify the extermination of another people under the pretext of Jewish survival.

This is not remembrance. It is sacrilege.

If Holocaust institutions remain silent while genocide is committed in real time, then they will forfeit their legitimacy. If they invoke the Shoah to shield the perpetrators of a new crime, then they will not educate the future. They will deceive it.

A Final Reckoning

The genocide in Gaza is the defining moral event of our time. It is not ambiguous. It is not hidden. It is livestreamed, admitted, and documented.

Britain’s leaders have enabled it.

The Genocide Convention obliges all signatories to prevent and punish genocide. The United Kingdom has done neither. Instead, it has protected the perpetrators, funded the machinery, and criminalised the opposition.

The names of those responsible are known. Their actions are a matter of public record. Their excuses will not survive serious scrutiny.

What is happening in Gaza cries aloud to Heaven.

And those who answered with silence or assistance will be remembered, not as bystanders, but as accomplices.

Selected Bibliography

• Bartov, Omer. “Israel’s Campaign in Gaza Meets the Legal Definition of Genocide.” The New York Times, July 15, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/15/opinion/israel-gaza-holocaust-genocide-palestinians.html
• Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT). “UK Arms Exports to Israel.” https://caat.org.uk/data/exports
• Declassified UK. “RAF Conducted 518 Surveillance Flights Over Gaza Since December 2023.” https://www.declassifieduk.org
• Gaza Ministry of Health. “Casualty Figures from Israeli Operations in Gaza.” July 2025.
• Global Legal Action Network (GLAN). “UK High Court Case on Arms Exports to Israel.” https://www.glanlaw.org
• Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC). “Gaza: Acute Food Insecurity Report.” https://www.ipcinfo.org
• International Court of Justice. “Application of the Genocide Convention: South Africa v. Israel.” https://www.icj-cij.org
• Segal, Raz. “A Textbook Case of Genocide.” Jewish Currents, Oct. 2023. https://jewishcurrents.org/a-textbook-case-of-genocide
• Catechism of the Catholic Church, para. 1868. https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P6C.HTM
• Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 64. Aquinas on unjust killing: https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3064.htm